In the summer of 1971 a revival minister came to town, a young man named Charlie Morrell, and for a week every girl in Signal Creek—especially Kate, who had just turned thirteen—lost their minds over him. He was in his twenties still, handsome and gently passionate, charismatic under the hot, bright tent set up on the town green. Reverend Lyle (Reverend Miller had retired) had invited Mr. Morrell to town, but it was Effie who stepped in as the church’s main emissary, and helped the young minister organize the revival.

She was thirty-two that year, and still pretty—she would be pretty all her life—but four children and a Southern diet had made her fat, and Henry no longer feared that she would attract another man’s attention. In this, as with so much else, he was naïve. Charlie Morrell left town after the revival, but a few months later he was back, staying with Reverend Lyle’s family for a few weeks—on what business, Henry didn’t know—and when Henry went off on his overnight runs up to Atlanta, Effie would see him. Henry never knew what they did together, but she was rarely at home, Kate said, and would often come back late, after the children had gone to bed, and Vivian had seen the two of them walking together around the Indian Mounds. When Henry said to Effie, as casually as he could, that he’d heard she was spending a lot of time with that revival boy, Effie said yes, he was a dear young man. And when Henry asked outright, “Is there something going on between you two?” she glared at him and said, “You of all people don’t get to ask me that.”

But she’d been drinking, and the next morning she apologized for snapping at him, and said no, nothing had been going on, she promised—he could ask Reverend Lyle if he didn’t believe her. But he told her he believed her, and put the matter to rest in his mind, and as far as he knew, Charlie Morrell never returned.

They still made love, occasionally, when he was home. He’d bumped up to engineer by then, and was seeing a girl in Atlanta, Genie Taylor, a waitress at the Shoney’s where he had breakfast before heading to the switchyard. She was twenty-four, and lived in an apartment by herself. But after a few months she said she loved him, and asked him to leave his wife, and he said he couldn’t do that, and broke it off.